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0 pointswl10y ago0 comments

• By charging a fee for an ID necessary to acquire a firearm, you tax the exercise of a constitutional right.

• An ID card does not guarantee that the bearer has not subsequently been deemed mentally incompetent nor convicted of a crime that disqualifies them from firearms ownership.

• Your proposal would require anyone who has ever sold a gun to maintain records of the transfer indefinitely. In order to have teeth, you'd have to create a new crime for failure to do so. Even federally licensed firearms dealers don't have to maintain records indefinitely.

All this aside, there is the larger issue that the kinds of events that prompt such proposals (Sandy Hook, Santa Barbara, San Bernardino, Charleston) have perpetuators who either passed NCIC or would have if they went through a dealer. And while mass shootings are what get all the news coverage, they are hardly representative of the average shooting, where the guns tend to have been acquired illegally already.

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2 comments · 1 top-level

aidenn010y ago· 1 in thread

It's not a tax if it's merely covering the costs of the transaction. That is that if we agree that it is a good thing to require background checks at all, then it will be part of the cost of transferring it.

If you don't agree that background checks are a good idea at all, then just say so.

This proposal is likely a lighter financial burden than either requiring everyone to get a background check for every transfer, or to require everyone go through a federally licensed dealer.

It wouldn't necessarily need to be indefinitely; how long one wants to require this is a policy choice. Long enough to catch repeat offenders is all one really needs; stopping a single person from just once committing any crime is pretty hard.

someguydave10y ago

What incentive does the pro-gun side have to tolerate any new restriction, no matter how insignificant?

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